Strain review: Purple Punch

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Purple Punch, one of the dankest buds around, smokes pungent and potent.

A friend and I have been engaged in an ongoing argument over the word “dank.” She thinks it just means “good” in general, whereas I think that it can be a generally positive adjective only by extension, or stoned metaphorical drift, from weed to other things. She sent me a text from a brewpub that advertised dank beer. And that made sense. Actual dankness is a good quality in both weed and hops. So a dank IPA is great. But a dank Budweiser? You see where I’m going. “Dank memes,” I would argue, are more like a dank basement than dank nugs.

But I won’t deny that in the right context — hops, cannabis, a shadow-cast woodland — dankness is a definite virtue. It is primordial and earthy, both in the sense of terroir and the sense wherein Rabelais or Verlaine or Chaucer are earthy. It has to do with sweat and pee and other bodily excretions and the kind of ease with sex that comes from people who grew up watching animals fornicate in the fields.

I know, the last thing the world needs is another dude verging on the erotic when talking about weed, so I’m gonna drift on over to the gustatory as I discuss Purple Punch — truly one of the dankest buds I’ve encountered. It’s pungent and potent, sticky and sickly sweet. If it were food, it would be chewy and gooey. It’s like a summer day in a sweltering, humid place like South Carolina where you don’t want to move, and lay strapped to the bed with the bands of your own sweat, but in a good way. (If you grew up in such a place, there’s a certain malarial nostalgia for it.)

Purple Punch’s tightly packed buds seem stacked up, built of molten globules of pure vegetalized goo, grown over with gorgeous red hairs longer than WiIlie Nelson’s pigtails and covered in a coat of light-dodging dappling crystals. The color suggests an etymological connection between Indica and indigo because the bud looks how the high feels.

It immediately brought to mind, almost before the lighter had cooled, Gerard Manley Hopkins’ great poem “Pied Beauty”: “Glory be to God for dappled things — / For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow; / For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim; / Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings; / Landscape plotted and pieced — fold, fallow, and plough; / And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim. ...”

Hopkins was a priest and buds like this didn’t exist in the late 19th century, but one suspects that all of old Gerard’s religious exertions, and poetic genius, brought him to a state not too far from the mental flowering floated by the Purple Punch, which comes in pretty strong with 21.5-percent THC. In terms of terpenes, it is dominated by pinene and that distributor of dankness to the world, myrcene, which is also the most prominent terp in hops. Glory be to God for myrcene. But let’s keep the dankness where it belongs.